Motorists are making more trips across the Bill Healy Memorial Bridge on Reed Market Road, the city’s most recent traffic counts show.

About 9,000 vehicles passed over the bridge on an average day during an October survey by a city consultant looking at bridge traffic patterns. That represents a nearly 30 percent increase over March numbers when the city counted about 7,000 trips.

It is still short of the 11,000 trips forecasted by the city when it designed the bridge. There may be a good reason for that. Traffic volume on the two nearest bridges has dropped slightly from a year ago.

There are fewer vehicles this fall on both the Columbia Street bridge in Bend’s Old Mill District and the Colorado Avenue bridge than there were six months ago.

The most recent counts show about 6,200 vehicles per day on the Columbia Street bridge. That’s down more than 900 trips from March.

There were about 1,600 fewer trips across the Colorado bridge this fall as well.

”It makes sense that if Reed Market had gone up a little bit and Colorado has gone down that people are finding a new route,” said Deborah Hogan, city traffic coordinator.

A majority of Bend voters endorsed the construction of the bridge in a September 2001 advisory vote. Councilors upheld the result in October, voting 6-1 to construct the bridge.

Mayor Oran Teater said he isn’t surprised that more people are using the bridge today. He predicts that by next summer the city will see the expected 11,000 cars and trucks on the bridge.

”I always thought that they would be there. And I wasn’t alarmed by the fact that they weren’t last time,” he said.

Councilor Bruce Abernethy said he was initially surprised but not overly concerned about the lower than expected numbers.

He said the bridge facts neither support the charges of opponents who said it wasn’t needed and would destroy the river corridor, nor vindicates proponents who said it had to be built sooner rather than later.

”Quite frankly, I think it turned out better than I anticipated,” Abernethy said.

Eric Flowers can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at

eflowers@bendbulletin.com.